Projects that improve water quality by planting vacant lots, parking strips, and other urban spaces with trees and community gardens also bring people out of doors and teach local kids about their environment.
In places like Phoenix and Minneapolis, scientists think that cities are starting to look alike in ways that have nothing to do with the proliferation of Starbucks, WalMart or T.G.I Fridays.
Dr. Rosi-Marshall will be the next Director of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, Long-Term Ecological Research project, a role that is targeted to begin in 2016.
Ecologists define an ecosystem as a unit of the landscape—a forest, a lake, or a river. Often, they are interested in the movement of materials through that area. Rain may deposit nitrogen in a forest, while a stream may carry nitrogen away from the forest and into a river.
A result of urban land use change is homogenization across cities, where neighborhoods in very different parts of the country have similar patterns of roads and other features. Understanding urban homogenization will provide the basis for understanding the impacts of urban land use change from local to continental scales.
